Mara Mattuschka

In this film, Mattuschka works exclusively with animation. The cheerful cartoon characters Mimi and Max have a bit of a childlike-bisexuality to them, even when the subject seems to be the desire for and the differences from the other sex: "Look at what I´ve got here," says Mimi when she lifts up her skirt, the reply she gets being, "Is that real...?".

Five people who are in a show at a bar, who live in this hotel and have very different relationships with one another. After the show – they are already sleeping – they are woken by Pan for the night and therefore wake up to the destruction that is held within them.

Mimi Minus spreads out a paper with a chequered pattern and drinks repeatedly from a bottle containing and dark liquid which is never emptied. The chequered paper is successively covered in chaotic painting until, finally, it is rolled out of the way. Underneath is a fresh chequered paper. With very intensive cutting, the film is composed of infinitely varied primary contradictions - black versus white, circle versus square, order versus chaos.

In an occupied establishment - a kind of self-defined sub-cosmos of reality - there is a sensual search for lust and fulfillment taking place. Women and men dance, desire, interact; their perfectly choreographed body game becomes a symbiotic extension of an excessively hedonistic sub- conscious. Amidst it all: a mafia boss seeks to take control of the establishment and finds the meaning of life in the process. Perfect Garden is a fabulously hypnotic film, utopian and realistic all at once

A short film by the German experimental filmmaker Michael Brynntrup from 1993. The film describes a surrealistic and absurd cycle of activities in a hermetically sealed cemetery from which the actors cannot break out.

Phaidros is based on Plato's eponymous dialogue and plays in an LBQT+ milieu of a present-day metropolis. The actor Emil is meant to embody the character of the poet Phaedrus in a battle of words with Werner Maria, who slips into the role of Socrates. When the borders between friendship and sexual initiation soon blur beyond the events on stage, too, the shrill, carnivalesque scenario turns into grotesque love triangles and quadrangles, which ultimately even cause a casualty.

Two women scientists investigate the various stages of evolutionary development. Drawn by the scientific linguistic system, they become enmeshed in the anal circuit.

We enter a constructed setting, against the background of a video wall that suggests we are in a restaurant. A Japanese restaurant, as can be concluded from the conveyor belt which forms part of the fittings. Running Sushi consists of a casual conversation between Steffi and Johnny in a sushi restaurant, while the parallel world of thoughts and sensations of both characters takes the stage. Each new dish has major consequences in the grotesque dream reality.

"Disobedience" - tells of the loss of illusions and utopias. Growing up in a Viennese family, marked by the father's vivacious dominance and public fame as editor-in-chief of the 'press', as well as by the mother's puzzling grief for husband and children, Terese seeks another life and joins the commune of action artist Otto Mühl. However, the initially seemingly free love and life experiment fails increasingly.

A body junkie: man must lay bare his hidden ingredients, dismantle his body, his integrity, his presence, and his identity in order to create a challenge both physical and metaphysical.

Mara Mattuschka's experimental film lures the viewer into a singular. powerfully illustrated and colourful picaresque world. Gucki, the landlady's daughter, has never forgotten this place of carnal pleasures and reconstructs her vision of spiritual and bodily devotion through observations of theatrical practise. QVID TVM is an excessively existential parable about the myriad crossing of paths between people - from humiliation to punishment, fulfillment to bliss.

A despotic youth spends his vacation oppressing the peaceful inhabitants of an island with his evil fantasies.

An opera diva (Mimi Minus) makes her grand solo appearance. The individual stages of her transformation in the dressing room are celebrated with glamorous gestures. A meditative ritual becomes a trigger for the appearance of a second, identical opera diva. This one, however, immediately transforms through the deployment of the most wonderful Mattuscha animation techniques into an aged, wrinkled version of the star with less than zero glamour appeal. A Freudian dream game begins.

A woman in a hall of mirrors on the Vienna Prater.

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. To his rehabilition he wrote an extensive piece of work, "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), which was published in 1903 and led to his temporary dismissal. Hereby Schreber became the most quoted psychiatric patient in scientific literature. The third part was realized by Peter Tscherkassy based on a concept by Ernst Schmidt Jr.

Mimi Minus, the star, advertises a new, sticky, black, brain-cleaning agent. She uses it first on her reflection in a mirror in order to clean one half of her brain and subsequently applies it to her whole body...

Mimi Minus on the escalator of horror. Mara Mattuschka´s alter ego once again sets off on a tour de force of physical renunciation. First she goes into a tumble when the ground is pulled out from under her feet. Caught in a weightless space, she undergoes a strange metamorphosis. Mimi´s body is subjected to unnatural forces and gradually deforms, her skin ruptures and - as if the human shell were only an intermediate stage in the process of evolution - is shed like a cocoon; a reptilian monster emerges.

The filmmaker and artist Mara Mattuschka and the composer and musician Elisabeth Schimana have a rendezvous. Mara Mattuschka hears nothing and Elisabeth Schimana sees nothing. They have, however, agreed on a common line, on a text to be written together that, like a score, will serve as this common line for a 50-minute AV performance. The text is about strings that oscillate in the body, tubes through which the body receives nourishment and air, skins that are made to vibrate like a membrane.

In the 21st century, Mimi wakes up and her computer relays the order: "Go back to start. Let's load Ludwig!" A sort of chase through her past and future begins.

In NavelFable Mara Mattuschka subjects herself to a second birth through endless pairs of tights. Her body struggles so hard and in such a deformed manner from out of the layers of nylon that the sheer struggle for survival becomes visible.